Kinetica Art Fair 2012

‘Kinetica Art Fair is a yearly event produced by Kinetica Museum. It brings together galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on universal concepts and evolutionary processes though the convergence of kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multi-disciplinary new media art, science and technology.’

I attended this years Art fair as a volunteer on the Intuition and Ingenuity exhibition stand, which consisted of art inspired by computer pioneer Alan Turing, celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth. The exhibition will shortly be at Lighthouse in Brighton, so I will save mentioning this further until a later date.

There was a vast array of works on display from Tim Lewis’ animatronic works (below), which consisted of freakishly concocted creatures that jolted and strutted around, to moving images, such as Sandra Crisp’s (http://sandracrispart.com/) film Oceanic, which explored 3D layers of the environment (2nd below).

Some of my particular favourites were:

Andras Mengyan http://www.andrasmengyan.com/ who is a Hungarian artist working with concerns around simultaneous perception. He was using lasers and animation, combined with a special liquid that he had developed with chemist to create his desired effect.

Sophie Cullinan’s installation was both provocative and yet innocent. Her sock paintings consisted of used socks that could be pumped up by various pumps, such as bike pumps or balloon pumps that had been painted an pink, udder type colour, to eventually inflate and look rather nipple like. Her blow up doll piece, Worn, again conjures up ideas of blow up sexual aids for me, even though there is something quite frumpy and childish about her patchwork exterior. Cullinan describes Worn as a ‘domestic machine’ on her website, I also agree that the idea of a woman made out of worn fabric who is continuously at work, work which is dictated by the viewer who has to press a button to make her inflate, is deeply symbolic of a woman’s struggle and of having to work under the ‘gaze’ of others. there is also something unnerving about the industrial hoover sound for the inflation.

Another film that enjoyed was a short film by Laura Jean Healey called The Siren described as:

‘The Siren is an exploration of the notion of the Other. It explores the nature of the feminine mystic within the screen and the seemingly active male gaze. The Siren, both alluring and terrifying, embodies the duel nature of all women throughout time and confronts the audience, asking if ‘I do not exist in my own right. If I am merely a symptom of male desire, then ‘what am I?’’

Lastly Nichola Rae (http://www.a2arts.co.uk/) had a projection of sonic frequencies that would interact and change pattern when a guitar was strummed or a mic sung into that were connected to it:

All in all it was a very inspiring day and I would strongly recommend next years fair to anyone interested in art/science/electronics/computing/pretty things etc…….